The Beatles’ Debut on ‘Ed Sullivan’

Ed Sullivan with Ringo Starr, George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney at a rehearsal 50 years ago.

Associated Press

By JAMES BARRON

February 7, 2014

Debbie Gendler, a teenager from Oakland, N.J., had gone to television shows before, taking a seat in the studio audience and clapping dutifully when the “applause” light flashed. But this one was different. There were crowds outside the studio that chilly afternoon in February 1964, hysterical crowds, and a phalanx of police officers blocking the way.

“I kept showing the ticket,” said Ms. Gendler, now Debbie Supnik, “and my mother had to fight to say to this one police officer, ‘She has a legitimate ticket. Let her through and get her in there.’ They walked me, finally, in through the front of the building, past a couple of barricades and girls who were upset that I was being ushered in and who started to pull on me, pull on my jacket.”

Someone inside directed her to a seat in the balcony. It was still early — airtime was more than an hour away. The stage crew was checking the lights and the cameras. “I sat and sat,” she said, “and waited.”

Debbie Supnik at home in Beverly Hills, Calif. In 1964 she was in the audience for the Beatles’ debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

She soon understood that she had been there, in person, on the night that clinched the Beatles’ place in American popular culture. It was a night she still describes as “electric,” “special” and “overwhelming.”

There were crowds that stampeded after the Beatles as soon as they landed at Kennedy International Airport. There were teenagers screaming on Midtown sidewalks, longing for a glimpse of John or Paul or George or Ringo in a window of the group’s suite at the Plaza Hotel. There was Ed Sullivan in a Beatles wig at a rehearsal the day before. There was a production assistant who stood in for the Beatle who skipped that rehearsal because he was ill (George, and after a visit from the house doctor at the Plaza, he was well enough to appear on the broadcast itself).

About 73 million people were watching when “The Ed Sullivan Show” went on the air the night of Feb. 9, 1964. Some crowded around tiny television sets they had bought with money saved from their allowances. Others watched huge living-room consoles with knobs and dials.

The marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater on Friday duplicated the one advertising the Sullivan program 50 years ago Sunday.

Marilynn K. Yee / The New York Times

But there were the lucky few who saw it the way Ms. Supnik saw it, live, inside what was then known as CBS Studio 50, a former Broadway house that would later be renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater. CBS received 50,000 requests for 728 tickets, an acceptance rate of 1.45 percent. The odds of getting into an Ivy League college are better.

“The minute you got into the space, the electricity of the moment absolutely took you over,” said Tonne Goodman, now the fashion director for Vogue magazine, who went with a school friend whose father had gotten tickets. “You were captivated. You were swept away.”

Like Ms. Goodman’s friend, some in the audience had fathers with connections — fathers who could call someone who knew someone at the Sullivan show or at the network. A few had connections to the band — Ms. Supnik had met a lawyer for Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. And some had simply written to CBS for tickets, which was the way most studio-audience tickets were distributed in those days.

Ira Gallen went because a friend from his Boy Scout troop in Brooklyn had sent a request for tickets months earlier. The week before the show, Mr. Sullivan announced who would appear when they would be in the audience.

“I had no idea who the Beatles were,” said Mr. Gallen, who was more interested in astronauts in those days. “I remember tons of girls, and that was it. But from that day on, I was buying the albums, and I bought a Ludwig set of drums, just like Ringo had, and I learned to play the drums. And I bought a Beatle wig. My father got angry. He said, ‘You bought that? It’s your mother’s birthday and you couldn’t buy her a gift, but you bought that?’ ”

Ira Gallen in his Upper West Side apartment. On his computer is a photograph from a fan magazine showing him at the show. A fellow Boy Scout had put in a request for tickets months earlier.

Richard Perry / The New York Times

The Beatles were not the only act on the show that night, although they might as well have been. Among the others were a husband-and-wife comedy team, Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill. Ms. Supnik met Ms. McCall in Los Angeles recently and apologized for having wished that she and Mr. Brill would get off the stage that night in 1964 so the Beatles could return.

Tickets had also been distributed for the dress rehearsal on Sunday afternoon, giving some an even more rarefied bragging right: “We saw the Beatles live at ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ before the public saw the Beatles,” said Alice Kestin, who was 14 then and went because a boy at her school — Woodmere Academy, on Long Island — had written for tickets.

The boy’s name was Fred Maron. He grew up to be a dentist. He does not describe the dress rehearsal as the defining moment of his life. “All I remember is everybody was screaming,” he said. “I mean, screaming. It wasn’t like when they were at Shea Stadium. That theater’s not that big. Even in the balcony, you were near them.”

The screaming at the rehearsal lasted through the songs the Beatles sang in their two segments on the program, among them “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The audience at the rehearsal got to scream some more, because the Beatles also videotaped a separate segment for broadcast two weeks later.

“I think everyone had a crush,” said Candace Cushing, who grew up in Short Hills, N.J. “Everyone had their own dream that Paul or John or George or Ringo would pick up the phone or pick them out of the audience or pick them out of the crowd at the Plaza and wave to them and their eyes would meet.”